Kim offers talks with South’s Moon
KIM Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has invited President Moon Jae-in of South Korea to visit his country “at an early date” for a summit meeting, Moon’s office announced Saturday.
Moon said the two Koreas should “work together to create the environment to make it happen”, a spokesman said.
Kim relayed the invitation through his trusted adviser and only sister, Kim Yo-jong, who met with Moon at the presidential Blue House in Seoul on Saturday, in the highest-level contact between the two Koreas in years. She is part of an official North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, and she attended the opening ceremony of the games Friday.
Her brother’s invitation to Moon, who has been eager to pursue dialogue with the North, raised the prospect of détente between the two Koreas after more than a year of rising tensions spurred by Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests, and by President Donald Trump’s threats to use military force to end the crisis.
But the overture also has the potential to divide South Korea from the United States, its main military ally. The Trump administration has discouraged South Korea from engaging with the North unless it shows clear signs of giving up its nuclear weapons program.
Vice President Mike Pence, who was also at the Olympic opening ceremony (and sat just feet away from Kim Yo-jong), has been critical of the North’s participation in the games, seeing it as an attempt to create just such a division.
In his message to Moon, Kim Jong-un “said he was willing to meet President Moon Jaein at an early date and asked him to visit North Korea at a convenient date”, said Kim Euikyeom, a spokesman for Moon.
Moon has said he was willing to meet Kim Jong-un only if he received assurance from the North that it would help resolve the crisis over the North’s nuclear weapons program. The exchange between KimYo-jong, who was visiting Seoul as her brother’s “special envoy”, and Moon indicated that the Koreas would soon begin high-level negotiations on the terms of a possible summit meeting.
“The South and North shared an understanding that they should continue the positive mood for peace and reconciliation created by the Pyeongchang Olympics and should promote inter-Korean dialogue, exchanges and cooperation,” Moon’s office said in a statement.
Moon also urged North Korea to talk to the United States, his office said. In the past, he has said that there was a limit to how much the Koreas’ ties could improve without a resolution of the nuclear weapons issue. In a news conference last month, he said he was not interested in “talks for talks’ sake”.
“If we are going to have a summit meeting, there has to be an atmosphere created for a summit meeting and there has to be some level of confidence that it would bring about some results,” Moon said then.
He seemed to make a similar point on Saturday, by referring to the need to “create the environment” for talks.
Still, Moon’s government is clearly more optimistic than the Trump administration about the potential for the Koreas’ cooperation at the Olympics to create the groundwork for more substantial discussions. At a reception Friday, Moon pointed to the joint Korean women’s ice hockey team – an Olympic first – as a starting point.
“The female ice hockey players from the two Koreas are now holding a small snowball in their hands,” he said. “Now, if we put our hearts and minds together, it will continue to grow larger and larger and turn into a snowman of peace.”
Moon joined Kim Yo-jong and other North Korean supporters Saturday in cheering for the team against Switzerland. The supporters waved blue and white flags that showed an undivided Korean Peninsula.
Pence, by contrast, avoided speaking with North Korean officials on Friday, and he and his wife did not stand, as most spectators did, when the athletes from both Koreas marched together under a flag representing a unified Korea. Earlier Friday, Pence met with defectors from the North and invited them to tell their stories of repression under Pyongyang.
Moon would like to bring both North Korea and the United States to the negotiating table. China has suggested that talks could start if the United States suspended its regular joint military exercises with South Korea, and if North Korea reciprocated by shelving nuclear and missile tests.
But both sides have held their ground. North Korea has said that its nuclear weapons are not for bargaining away. In a speech that Kim Jong-un gave on New Year’s Day, in which he first raised the possibility of the North participating in the Olympics, he vowed to “massproduce” nuclear weapons and missiles.
Pence reiterated on Friday that the North must “put denuclearisation on the table and take concrete steps with the world community to dismantle, permanently and irreversibly, their nuclear and ballistic missile programs”.
“Then, and only then, will the world community consider negotiating and making changes in the sanctions regime that’s placed on them today,” Pence said after a meeting with Moon.
Some analysts were sceptical of that prospect. “Kim Jong-un has no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons,” said Cheon Seong-whun, a former presidential secretary for security strategy and now a visiting research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “With his summit proposal, he seeks to incite friction between Seoul and Washington by widening their policy gap.”
Moon cannot rush for a summit meeting given Washington’s deep misgivings, and because “South Koreans are not as enthused about another summit meeting with North Korea as they used to,” Cheon added.
Moon’s two progressive predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, had both struggled under growing domestic criticism after their trips to Pyongyang had resulted in large shipments of aid and investment but failed to end the North’s nuclear weapons program.
A senior analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, Cheong Seong-chang, agreed that Kim Jong-un’s latest overtures were aimed at easing its isolation and the impact of sanctions. But South Korea also needed to ease tensions, especially given Trump’s threat to take a military option, he said.
“It will not be wise for President Moon to reject dialogue with the North and do nothing but stick to sanctions for the sake of the alliance with the United States,” Cheong said. “South Korea will suffer the most if miscalculation or hostility drives the North and the United States into an armed clash.”
The main political opposition, the conservative Liberty Korea Party, warned Moon was duped by the North’s “false peace offensives”. But Moon’s governing Democratic Party heartily welcome the prospect of an inter- Korean summit meeting.
A party spokeswoman, Kim Hyo-eun, went so far as to call for the reopening of a joint factory park in the North Korean town of Kaesong. Moon’s conservative and impeached predecessor, President Park Geun-hye, shut down the park two years ago. Washington says that the reopening of the park would violate sanctions – a concern Moon shared.
The US has also opposed suspending its joint military exercises with the South, though it agreed to delay drills scheduled for February until the Olympics are over. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, asked Moon on Friday to hold the exercises soon after the games end, but Moon told Abe not to meddle in South Korea’s “sovereignty and internal affairs”, South Korean officials said.
If Moon accepts Kim Jongun’s offer to come to the North, it will be the third summit meeting ever held between the two Koreas. Kim Jong-il, Kim’s father, had met with two South Korean presidents in Pyongyang before his death in 2011: with President Kim Dae-jung in 2000, and with President Roh Moo-hyun in 2007.
On Saturday, members of the small progressive Minjung Party held a rally near an Olympic site, condemning Pence and Abe for “diplomatic discourtesy” and “ruining South Korea’s party”.